Conservative Party Conference: David Cameron's vision is about far more than deficit reduction

Family, welfare and education reforms give One Nation Tories hope for the
future.

'Let sunshine win the day!” was how David Cameron exhorted the party faithful a few years ago, to much sophisticated sniggering in the newspapers and a certain “Eh?” among the traditionalists of his membership. As I arrived in Manchester on Saturday, though, sunshine was certainly winning. The city baked in a heat like no October in living memory, right up to the point that the TUC started their protest march, when the heavens opened and it began to rain. Insert your own metaphor here.

The slogans that parties use to decorate the halls must, presumably, be chosen with a purpose, rather than being simply a random sample of inoffensive words. The Lib Dems had “In Government. On Your Side”, a boast of relief (“At Last! In Government At Last!”) which is at least understandable, even if the second bit of it reads a little oddly to a Conservative: wondering which side a Liberal is on, and how long they will remain there, are not questions that always have obvious answers.

Labour had some collection of words I’ve already forgotten, which seems so fitting an epitaph to their conference that I prefer not to look it up. I detected no malice towards Ed Miliband among Conservative activists this week, which should worry him; a friend summed it up for me, wrinkling her nose and looking embarrassed: “I feel sorry for him.” A successful Labour leader should provoke something more visceral in a Tory than pity.

The Conservative halls in Manchester were decorated with huge oak tree logos, coloured with the Union flag, accompanied by the words “Leadership for a Better Future”. The merging of the flag with the oak tree is apt: there was no factionalism or antagonism between traditionalists and modernisers; among the latter, Nick Boles MP is not afraid to say we should discuss immigration and crime; among the former, Tim Montgomerie, editor of the ConservativeHome website, has never opposed making the party more at ease with the country it serves. There was never a big contradiction going on here anyway. You can hate the euro, and not dislike gay people, all at the same time: a blindingly obvious conclusion for normal human beings. It just takes political parties longer to work these things out.

Of the actual phrase itself, it’s not the “Leadership” bit that was contentious – it offends my working-class morality as much as it gets up the noses of Labour, but David Cameron was self-evidently born to be Prime Minister – but the “For a Better Future”. That brief moment of sunshine last weekend was shocking, because it underlined just how grim a state we’re in, economically and socially; and worse, how inured we have become to the gloom. “Is This As Good As It Gets?” would have been an honest slogan for the start of every conference, if not a politically hopeful one. Was the Prime Minister able to convince conference, convince the country, that ahead lies a better future than constant bickering over “cuts”, and the howling of special interest groups when their sector faces reform?

Yes, I think he did. The speech didn’t just set out plans to introduce “some” policies to make “some” things a little bit better. Neither was it a political barnstormer, of the type that swept the party into choosing Mr Cameron as leader. It was a curious mixture of the prime ministerial and the deeply personal.

That he would review, again, the debt crisis, and set the budgetary constraints (and all the noisy protests) in that context, was both prime ministerial and obvious: both because he means it, and because it is so vital to his electoral strategy that the voters agree with the deficit reduction plan. So far, so gloomy. The thunder clouds began to gather in Manchester.

But the parts of the speech where Mr Cameron became passionate were highly personal; you can tell when you watch him what he really cares about in life, and it isn’t deficit reduction.

I left the speech with the belief that he has set his sights on leading one of the great, One Nation, reforming Tory ministries: his personal commitment to ending the scandal of children left, needlessly, in care, when there are families desperate to share their homes; the attack on the “apartheid” of the state/private split in the education system and his encouraging words to the public schools to take advantage of Michael Gove’s work and open academies; his demand that big business start to play its part and open up apprenticeships; his contempt for the Left’s approach to poverty, seeing money recycled from one poor person to another, rather than the Coalition approach of not taxing the poorest people at all; the need for a “Tory housing revolution”.

His commitment to marriage as society’s central institution to shepherd stability and safeguard love moved me more than I expected from a politician’s speech. He will be sneered at in the liberal press for his commitment to marriage; as with the sneering about human rights and cats, such jeers can be ignored, safely, because – and there’s no need for a focus group about this – Mr Cameron speaks here for the quiet and the decent. I predict the introduction of marriage tax allowances ahead of the next election.

Most of his plans will require time to pass before a judgment can be made on them. But in education, Mr Cameron both made clear his “contempt” for the enemies of reform (I suspect we’re not all quite in this together) and his belief that the work of Gove will be one of his administration’s most important legacies.

That such optimism is justified was evident in a talk to conference from Quddus Akinwale, a 17-year-old student from Burlington Danes Academy in Hammersmith. He told us about the chaos at his school, prior to it taking on academy status. It won’t surprise you to know that his headmistress now prioritises uniforms and discipline, has ensured that actions have consequences – for staff and pupils – and that consequently her school has exam outcomes more than twice as good as was the case five years ago.

Quddus is not a statistic: we’re talking about a young life saved. Academies and free schools are bitterly opposed by the teaching unions and those middle-class liberals who think they know better than Quddus and his mum what sort of school he should attend (in his case, a failing one). The academy revolution is transforming the schools landscape of Britain – more than a million children now attend academies like Quddus’s.

These are the reforms Tories most want. Though we lack much in the way of ideology, we instinctively know that our best hope to change Britain is by engineering institutions that will continue to transmit our values long after we’re no longer in government. If there is any Tory unease at the moment, it’s about those areas where the opposite appears the case: where despite being in government, nothing seems to be changing, because the Labour mindset continues unabated. See the way the Establishment turned on Theresa May, for daring to question the Human Rights Act. If Mr Cameron can match the success in education with longer-term successes in welfare and criminal justice reform, he will deliver the future his activists dream of: one with a Tory majority.

Back in London, I queued for the bus; the sky still overcast. My thoughts returned to Quddus. It turns out that there’s a hint of sunshine in the future after all.